We’re talking 5+ minutes on a Ryzen 7 2700 on both NVMe SSD or a WD Black mechanical hard drive. Just checking out Heart of Iron 4, Europa Universalis IV and Imperator: Rome on Xbox GamePass PC.
Is this normal?
No. Especially not on SSD.
Takes less than a minute for me, usually less than 30 seconds for HoI4 (and that is with a bunch of mods).
Hmm, it’s been a long time since I loaded up Stellaris and it too is slow to load.
Yeah, on HDD for me, albeit with an ancient processor, HoI IV is probably 45 seconds, EU IV maybe twice that. That’s to the title screen. To load a saved game is a few seconds.
Haven’t loaded either game in a while though.
It would be interesting to check gamepass version vs non gamepass on the same computer.
I believe (in some cases) it’s due to the fact that they read a ton of small text files when loading, and Windows is bad at opening lots of files quickly. I noticed Stellaris is much quicker to load (but slower to run) on a Linux laptop vs Windows desktop.
In my experience, Paradox games take a long time to load if I haven’t played them in a while. However, if I load it up after recently having played it (especially if it was the last game I played), it loads much faster. Same with Total War Warhammer and some other games.
Nothing should ever take 5 minutes to load, no. Something’s going on.
As others have noted, if you’ve not played the game in awhile this is (unfortunately) absolutely normal. It’s also completely ridiculous, of course.
I just installed HoI4 from Xbox app and tried: 23-24 seconds from paradox launcher to load a previously saved game directly.
SSD or mechanical?
I can only speak for myself, and I can only speak to EU4 and CK2, but those two games tend to take an excruciatingly long time to start up if I haven’t played them in awhile. That’s launching from Steam on a mechanical hard drive.
I have a SDD but rei tried too in one:
Huh, maybe it doesn’t matter. I should fire up EU4 on the new SSD and see what happens.
Anecdata: 1:00:68 (ie one minute) to load on Nvme SSD on Ryzen 3700x from shortcut to title screen.
Including a surprisingly long time to load the EU4 launcher.
Immediate restart: 00:29:98, presumably shaving of half a minute due to lack of the usual paradox JIT data file compiling - must still have been in RAM.
Tested EU4: a little over 2 minutes on a WD Black with an Intel i7 920 (i.e. a Dorito). That’s a lot faster than it used to be for me.
It may not be related, but in the past I’ve had Windows 10’s real time anti-malware protection bug out and just massacre loading speeds. You could disable it temporarily to see if that makes the difference.
I should clarify that this is after clicking Play on the Paradox launcher. 2D art comes in and takes forever to load to the game menu itself. EU4 took 2min. Imperator Rome: 1 minute to get to art another seconds to get the quote to appear and 5 minutes to get custom cursor and main menu to appear.
Get rid of your virus scanners, they are useless and slow down particularly paradox games to crawl.
I’ve excepted most of my game installation folders from scanning to speed up my old system. Seems to have helped quite a bit.
I don’t have anything extra for security just Win10z